Spam battle slows internet down to a crawl

Yesterday, you may have noticed things running a little slower on your computer/phone/tablet/whatever. You may have filled the air with rage, shaking your device and threatening it with a hammer, but rest assured, it wasn't the fault of your gadget.

What happened was, a cyberwar kicked off thanks to a whole load of spam.

It all kicked off between an anti-spam website and a web hosting company it blacklisted, which saw 300gb of data A SECOND flooding the internet.

So if you were trying to watch a film on Netflix, and found it kept crashing or buffering, their servers were groaning away, caught up in a spam battle. With excellent hyperbole, IT security consultant Kevin Wharram said the attackers were beginning to threaten the crucial domain name system which underpins the whole internet.

He said: "If they managed to direct too much traffic through the DNS, it could bring down the internet."

The target of the attack is Spamhaus, and Cyberbunker - a company based in an old NATO bunker, which is just great - retaliated to a blacklisting by trying to break the internet. Apparently, it is the largest of its type we've seen to date, and was orchestrated by a team of hackivists and cyber-criminals.

So, if you experienced online trouble last night, it was a bunch of super geeks who smell like Pot Noodles seeing who could swing their virtual dicks the highest.

Twats. they need their vocals and fingers ripped out so then they can only interact with a computer like Stephen Hawking.
Having said that, he's quite productive.
Might not be such a good plan after all.

This was debunked pretty throughly, it's the front page of Gizmodo atm. Just an internet security company making some sales and the media taking their hyperbole as gospel. For comparison, these days just a small nation passes terrabytes per second on their internet backbone.